Angel Dust by Aoi Nanase
Summary: Seraph comes from the far future, one where warfare is banned and humans instead merge with humanoid like creatures, like herself, and work out their anger that way. Somehow she has fallen through time and space to present day Earth and makes a contract with the human girl Yuina in order to fight off the people who are responsible for her trip.
The Good: It's a one volume work that wraps up neatly without any loose ends which is always nice (especially since this means I don't have to look for even more volumes to buy). It's an odd mixture of fighting, slice of life and shojo-ai so I suppose if someone likes that odd combination of stories they might like this one, although it's so bland and bad that I'd recommend this manga more for the art than the story and that's a different section of this review
The Bad: This was, simply put, a very poorly written story in every way it could be. Characters do things for no good reason ("Hey, I'm partnered with the girl who tried to kill your partner, although I have no idea how we know this or why I'm even telling you in advance!"), the pacing is so bad in places that I had to keep flipping back and forth to make sure I wasn't missing a few pages and in the end there just didn't seem to be a point to this story. Well, Yuina grew a little but the only reason she needed growth was because of a completely trivial incident years earlier that made me want to beat my head against a wall.
The Art: The art is alright but, as I said several times back during webcomic review month, I prefer a strong story to strong artwork so having such a weak story made me appreciate the art less. It's shojo art with big eyes, everyone looks gorgeous, sadly almost all the characters look the same and nothing about the art really amazed me. It's pretty but it's also pretty generic.
I expect that I'll take this over to the used bookstore sometime soon and see if I can get store credit there for something I'd rather have instead. This was rather disappointing but I wasn't expecting the book to be that great actually, if it's in a grab bag for a really reduced prices chances are that the sellers couldn't sell it and they couldn't sell it because it was bad, still worth the risk I think though.
